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Creating the Infographic: Nuts and Bolts

Yesterday, I shared out the infographic that I created using data from my students’ reading journals on how many pages they had read in the first week of our independent reading. It was really a way to capture the overall reading, excite them into thinking about data and books, and (for me) a way try out infographic creation. A few folks have asked how I went about doing it.

First, of course, I needed data. I had thought of using a massive chart in the room, having students track page each day. But that seemed cumbersome, and maybe a bit too distracting. So, instead, on the day I was collecting their reading journals for review, I had them write down the number of pages that they had read over the past week, or if they did not have access to every book they had read, they could “guestimate.” Those numbers ranged from 20 pages in a week to one student who read 1,000 pages in a week. (And I made no judgement on quality of books, either. It was all raw pages.)

Next, I used my calculator to come up with overall tally (almost 10,000 pages), and did some averaging: number of pages per student for the week and number of pages per student per day. Again, I was seeking interesting information that could be part of an informational display. I thought about adding the numbers of most and least pages read, but then realized that would make my slow readers feel bad about their fluency rates, so I abandoned that.

Now that I had my data, I needed a way to make the infographic. Of course, you can make an infographic in just about any platform. Powerpoint or Keynote work fine, and I realized later that Glogster would work well. But since I was exploring my own use of something new, I did some searching around. There plenty of tools now for creating infographics, although some are more “canned” than others. I went with Piktochart because it seemed flexible enough for my needs. And I found it easy to use. It was mostly Drag-drop, and replace text in their samples, and tinker with colors and design. A click of a button and I had downloaded it as an image file, and then uploaded it into Flickr, where I shared it here and at my classroom blog (which I will share again to the classes today).